Mooneater

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█ Shaded Space 97% imperial | 3% wildclaw 50% starmap | 50% wasp 50% constellation | 50% bee 15% spines | 85% crackle

< 2700 g

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Work In Progress Lore by @maocifer
If you own one of their descendants, please feel more than free to incorporate Karma/Moon's lore into your own, and letters from hatchlings/grandchildren/etc bring me copious amounts of joy!

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New Lore Plot:

Trained by her parents to be a fearless warrior, she never questions anything until she discovers that the outcast of her clan is her own older sister. Moon offers to teach her to fight but Azara refuses to shed the blood of others, they grow close, Azara being her one respite from death. When Azara fails to show for their meeting one day, Moon searches for her, thinking that maybe she got lost because she's blind. She discovers her body and buries her in the graveyard, alone. She returns to her worried clan and reveals that she found Azara dead near the border, her body practically torn into two halves. She's shocked at the sudden care they show for the outcast, blaming their enemies for the death of "innocent Azara". In the years to follow she hardens her mind and body for the war her clan promises will come as more and more territory is being claimed by Arcana and their "secret weapon". One day, on the border with Arcana, she finds a jagged trail of black that seems to grow with every second. When a beetle scurries across it, it immediately turns black and dead and the trail grows. Moon attempts to tell her clan but they're preparing for the war, unsettled by the tension. When she returns, the black has consumed a tree and ripped into the earth like a claw, and she can feel the ground beneath her feet vibrating. She's then attacked by an Arcana patrol and she's beating them until theiy touch the black and it starts to spread through them. She runs away to her clan and as soon as they hear of an Arcana patrol, the entire clan of Wind rushes into battle, her parents assure her that the tremors are just tactics of Rock. She fights with every breath in her body until she stumbles on the shaking ground and her talons touch the black. She guiltily retreats to Azara grave, vowing that if she dies, she dies beside her sister. She defends the territory there until Karma comes along. He fights her and without a shred of hesitation or guilt, with nothing but black in his dark eyes, rips off her infected arm. She screams as he pulls her away from Azaras grave and then passes out. (Karma or Moon's bio should include their closeness in Adavar, after she discovered on the ship that he saved her life and nothing good came from hating him)

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Old Lore Plan:

"It seems we have come to an impasse."
Thunder rumbled overhead, shaking the very core of the unstable land beneath the drakes' claws. The weather was in disarray, the once lush land to the east now laid to waste by torrential rains and impactful winds. A storm brewed in the west as well, and the two threatened to meet in an absolute pure form of chaos, destroying the planet on which it all stood.

"Indeed."
The two drakes stared at each other warily, claws flexing and both itching for another fight as their wounds still oozed with fresh blood. Green eyes met red ones in an intense glare, and they both saw the exhaustion within each other.
"If we don't leave now, we'll—"
The Wildclaw cut him off with an angered scoff. "You leave, you are the intruder."
The Imperial rolled his eyes. "I came because this planet is all but dead."
"My planet was fine before you set your claws here! We lived, we prospered!" She shot back.
His red gaze softened slightly. "You kid yourself. You all knew it was doomed, that's why the ships stopped coming... We all knew... they gave up on this world."

Moon blinked away the cloudiness. She wasn't ready to give up on her home and neither was he.

The story had been told to them countless times: the arcane god of the ancient planet saw in its giant eye —the one in which it gazed upon the stars with— another planet among the constellations, green with life. So it gathered its ilk, constructed a space boat, and sent a legion of dragons into the stars. They were supposed to return, in other lifetimes, with documented experience and studies — but they couldn't.
The space boats burned in the sky and they couldn't return no matter how much their ancestors had tried to rebuild it, they simply didn't have the ingenuity of a god.
Their gods didn't abandon them, and age after age, the arcane god sent more drakes to colonise the new planet; often hatchlings that the older ones took in as their own children — their own descendants.
Moon and Karma were two of those hatchlings, none could be created on the new planet without the energy from a god.

In their lifetime, the drakes of the new planet had divided themselves back into their ancient alignments, but their mothers had told them many stories of when they had converged like the stars to aid each other.
Now the clans were alone; the god had stopped sending new drakes and their numbers had declined rapidly. Those who separated also suffered, but their pride and faith kept them from coming together.
Out here the abyss was her only friend, it had been for ages; and the weathered bodies of his family were his.
Of Wind and Plague, they were the only two left.

Karma had a space boat, one that Arcana had crafted from the debris of others. Plague stole it and he and his siblings had tested it to the moon — not far but it had taken countless days.
When he returned, the ground quivered and shifted beneath his feet. Chaos began to emerge from the depths of their home, like an ancient darkness eating up the energy from the young earth and driving it into madness.
He still had the space boat, the very thing that caused the battles between Plague and the other flights.

Karma had trespassed onto Wind's territory to gather survivors before they fled — to return to their first home, the divided planet of the ancient gods.
Moon attacked him there, defending the land like all fighters were trained to do, but she wasn't the only one highly skilled in combat.

Wind ruffled Moon's mane. "I'm staying," she whispered firmly.

The Imperial blinked twice and his jaw twitched. "So be it." He turned away, limping as he headed off towards the boat. He had others there waiting for him to pilot it, and he didn't want to die. "At least I know when to quit, and put my pride behind me."

The Wildclaw watched him go, getting smaller on the grey horizon as the rumbling of the storm grew louder and the wet soil cried beneath her talons. Karma was right, the land was in pain and their planet was dying.

The sudden urge to chase after him —or beat him to the ship— ran through her like a spring river... so she did.
The thundering of claws behind him caused the Imperial to smile solemnly, and he picked up his pace.


. . .





She swung her naginata and the sharpened blade cut through the sack like wet mud.
Moon huffed boredly and tilted her head, watching the sand spill out slowly.

"Training again?"
She turned to the familiar voice, her eyes narrowing at the sight of Karma lounging lazily at the border of the dirt practice field. She'd fought him and won countless times, and each time was revenge for daring draw with her on the plains of her own territory.

She ignored his question. "Don't you have somewhere to be?" she asked bluntly, leaning on her pole.

Karma shrugged. "Gathering, you mean? Been there, done that." He waved it off dismissively. They were new to the clan; he wasn't that good but he liked to think he was and Moon didn't have the energy to get into a fight with him about it.
She rolled her eyes and went back to slashing at the makeshift beast before her. The time spent on the space boat had eaten away at both her mind and muscle, and she found she could hardly even walk let alone fight after landing.

Sornieth was completely different from what anyone aboard the boat had imagined, but the duo left the wreckage together, opting not to find the arcane god and question him about abandoning them all. In fact, the pair made promises to themselves to not question much about the unfamiliar world and to speak little of their dead home.

She had tried to continue hating him after their arrival in Adavar, but after coming to terms with the fact that he had indeed saved her by ripping off her infected arm, it was hard to. Azara must have loved him for a reason, she wouldn't hate that her little sister occasionally found him charming, would she?

Their first nest had been one of the first things they questioned — it was Karma's curiosity that bore it, and she didn't mind giving in to his curiosity every now and then. They weren't nice dragons, they weren't born it, but they trusted each other and that was enough. They were even worse parents though, battling with spitting tongues over who would warm the eggs next and, of course, she always won and left him to it.

Karma played with his whiskers as he watched his mate hack mercilessly at the wooden dummy, clearly deep in thought as her swings held no meaning or force.
Now that they didn't need to, he didn't particularly want to get back into training — he had spent his whole life training in the name of contagion, but now he was content with diving into the undergrowth in search of food and nothing more.

It was the life.
He got to do little and she got to hone her fighting skills, it was what kept them happy.
Every second, every moment alive, they were going to cherish.